“Yes.”
She smiled.
“What,” I said.
“The thought of you rampaging about in the university tenure committee,” Susan said, “is very engaging.”
“Rampaging?” I said. “I can be delicate as a neurosurgeon when it’s called for.”
“Most university tenure committees call for rampaging, I think.”
“I admit to being more comfortable with that approach,” I said.
Moved by an impulse understandable only by another dog, Pearl raised up and began to lap my face. I hunched up and endured it until she decided I’d had enough and switched to Susan.
“How’d you know about the case?” I said.
She was fending Pearl off, so it took her a while to answer. But finally, Pearl-free and makeup still mostly intact, Susan said, “Hawk discussed it with me, before he asked you.”
“He did?” I said.
“He wanted my view on whether he was asking more of you than he should,” Susan said.
“And you answered?”
“I answered that he had the right to ask you for everything and vice versa.”
“What’d he say?”
Susan smiled.
“He agreed,” she said.
I nodded.
“Is Hawk’s friend gay?” Susan said.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“But wouldn’t raging heterosexuality be a useful defense against the allegation that the graduate student killed himself as the result of an affair with Professor Nevins?”
“I guess it would,” I said.
“Did you ask him?”
“No.”
“I understand why you would not, but isn’t it something that needs to be established?”
“Can it be established?” I said. “In my experience it’s not always so clear-cut.”
Susan leaned her elbows on the top step and pressed her head back against Pearl’s rib cage. She thought about my question for a moment while I observed the way in which her posture made her chest press sort of tight against her jacket.
“Are you looking at my boobs?” Susan said.
“I’m a trained investigator,” I said. “I notice everything.”
“Do you make judgments on what you observe?”
“I try not to, but am sometimes forced to.”
“And the boobs?”
“Top drawer,” I said. “What about the question?”
“It’s a good one,” Susan said, “and much more complicated than is generally thought.”
“Then I’ve come to the right place.”
“Yes.” Susan smiled at me. It was a smile that could easily have launched a thousand ships. “Complications R Us.”
She rubbed the back of her head on Pearl for a moment.
“Sexuality is not as fixed as is commonly thought, and the discussion of it has become so political that if you quoted in public what I’m about to say I’d probably deny I said it.”
“Before or after the cock crowed?” I said.
“I didn’t know it crowed,” Susan said.
“Never mind,” I said. “Talk to me about sexuality.”
Susan smiled but didn’t go for the obvious remark.
Instead, she said, “I have treated people who experienced themselves as homosexual at the beginning of therapy and experienced themselves as heterosexual at the end.” Susan was picking her words carefully, even with me. “I have treated people who experienced themselves as heterosexual at the start of therapy and experienced themselves as homosexual at the end.”
“And if you said that in print?”
